Anaïs Tondeur is a visual artist. She works and lives in Paris. She graduated from a Master in Mixed-Media at Royal College of Art (London, 2010) after completing a Bachelor (Hons) Textiles at Central Saint Martin’s School (London, 2008). Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions in Europe, South America and the United States.

"...Over the course of her practice, Anaïs Tondeur has collaborated with anthropologists, philosophers, oceanographers, and geophysicists. She has undertaken residencies at institutions such as CERN, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, and the Hydrodynamics Laboratory at the Ecole Polytechnique. On the one hand, her work emerges from within a scientific tradition of research and experimentation. On the other, it stands just a little apart, able to critique that tradition from a distance. Like anthropologist Tim Ingold and philosopher Donna Haraway – both of whom Tondeur cites as influences – her work pushes productively at the boundaries of scientific knowledge.

Tondeur’s palette is limited largely to black and white, grey or sepia. She records worlds touched by memory or imagination: knowledge as found in a dusty archive, or viewed through the cracked lens of history. In so doing, she often looks back to an age when the scientist was also an inventor, an artist, or an explorer. Mutation of the Visible (2011-16) is a series of painstakingly beautiful drawings that chart changing depictions of the moon following developments in observational technologies from the seventeenth century to the present day. In I.55 (2012), a book of texts and drawings, she traces the material history of graphite – from crystal to commodity, from tool to cause of death, and finally a specimen in a museum awaiting rediscovery. For photographic series Walking the Line (ongoing), Tondeur has walked tectonic fractures in Iceland and California to propose a more embodied understanding of geological time. Following Ingold, Tondeur espouses an idea of the researcher as wayfarer rather than pioneer. Such works resist scientific claims to purity or transcendentalism in favour of an understanding of knowledge that is rooted in the historical and the material.

As the exhibition’s title, Fabuler des Mondes, suggests, Tondeur increasingly sees the artist – like the scientist – not simply as an observer, or even an occupier, but as a creator of worlds: a founder of fictions or fables, a fabricator. From mechanism to organism; from Terra Mater to Galileo’s book of nature or Babbage’s “the air itself is one vast library”; from ecosystems to Gaia, animal rights, deep time, or the Anthropocene: each reshapes our knowledge of the world and, in turn, reshapes the world itself. “Fiction gives us the power to participate in the construction of other possible futures,” says Tondeur, “to build or project ourselves, to test and embody other models in response to ecological crisis.”

… As the water rises, Tondeur forces us to ask: where does responsibility lie now? And how should each of us respond?"